Several years ago, I used psychedelic substances and lucid dreaming as tools to assist in the process of world building for a fantasy setting I intend to begin writing novels for.

To preface this discussion, I will give the backstory to my introduction to lucid dreaming, and then my own experience in actually having lucid dreams, specifically two.

My experience in lucid dream world construction began so many years ago, I was living with a friend after leaving college, and that house had psychedelics regularly flowing through. We liked to brand ourselves young psychonauts, and used these substances to dissect, cross examine, and play with the human mind in altered states of conscience. Roommate 1, he preferred his research through LSD, roommate 2 preferred psilocybin mushrooms, and I myself was delving into the literary aspects of these, reading about Albert Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Carl Jung, and Terence McKenna (my personal favorite).

Anyways, with the altered states of conscience that we regularly maintained, we had come to all the standard conclusional ideas of reality and the universe being but thoughts, mass hallucinations on their massive scales both physical and societal, of tearing down our fundamental understanding and perceptions of what reality even means in the objective sense, and were left with finally the only logical conclusion after I had injected our psychedelic experiences with the base of dreams. That reality, our day to day lives were but very lucid dreams on a recurring and regular large scale. I could go into further detail with this, but that's a discussion for the off topic boards.

Now, before this, for several years, I had been working on a fantasy setting merely for writing exercises, to inspire me to draw, and generally just day dreaming. I had developed this massive canon that underwent significant scrutiny when I was under the influence, and one night, stoned alone, I had been reflecting on our ideas of a dreaming reality, of our presence as metaphorical gods over our own perceptions, and I got curious about how I could mesh it with my writing, and so I started ti research the concepts of lucid dreaming.

I had heard of lucid dreaming so many times before, you know how it goes, of having control over a dream, recognizing you are dreaming, and then playing in these little realities born of your sleeping mind. I did the research on how to start dreaming, and began practicing that night. I had a vivid dream, and was aware, but could not control it. I was, as most usually are, excited over the experience.

So this goes on, but a week into attempting every night, I finally do it. This is my first purposeful lucid dream experience, and the first I'm going to tell you of in this post.

It was one of those realistic dreams. It felt like I was living another day in a regular life, but I started noticing key differences. My locale of work had a different floor plan, some coworkers were replaced with different characters, some wore new clothes, and the stations we worked at were vague and unimportant, like usual. But I recognized these differences and stopped moving. When I did, the people, my coworkers looked at me, perhaps interpreted as my excitement wondering if I'll actually manage control this time.

And I did. My intent from the very start of my endeavors was that of world building. And so this alternate timeline dream reality shattered. It broke apart like a mirror, and the shards were hot and melting, fazing in and out, more and more blurred with each impossibly long nanosecond, until only my disembodied conscience remained in a total void of abyssal blackness. I had done it. I had torn apart my dream, and was left with nothing. I could rebuild it from scratch.

And so I did. In one explosive outburst, it was as though I had silently shouted a binary star system into existence, and enforced my own bastardized laws of physics over this newborn cosmic chid of mine. I tore a planet into existence, and its moon, and filled it with my old canon. Once I did, as I had so heavily put it under such scrutiny before, the system seemed to crack up with inconsistencies, as I had subconsciously been disappointed with what I had created. So I backed away and let the dream take some manner of control back to its own hands. I saw the world take a more defined shape, with colossal forests of crystal trees, with unfathomably deep oceans, sprawling and gaping caverns filled with crawling and chittering life, and civilizations spring up in all corners of this sort of mega-earth I had ripped into this dream.

And then I woke up.

I was overjoyed, I had taken my first steps into building my world in my dreams and it had proven more magnificent than I could have ever imagined.

This second dream is a more detailed vision after a few months of lucid dreaming every single night since that first successful attempt.

I was the conscious oversoul of the world in the perspective of one of five metaphysical gods that held it together. It was so loud at first, with so much happening that I felt myself almost wake up. But I slowed it down, and I recognized I could feel the dreaming conscience of every being on the planet.

I saw the scholars of the archival shrines, mothers walking their children to school, eidolon phantoms sweeping over the celestial cities, the birth of fungal mycelium spires. I could feel cults dedicated to becoming one with my own extradimensional self trying to commune with me, with small tendrils of my psyche entangled in the dead souls of corpses made to walk. I could feel the looming intent of the mycelium god Vangrus and his berserker clerics waging their single-handed wars. The god beasts of the ocean knew me, and the living architectural constructions of deep ocean metropoli sang out and beamed impossible colors in the honor of my rarely experienced perspective of the world. I saw it across the full time and at one point approximately eight and a half billion civilized souls, and at another around twelve billion. Those cults and those metropoli rang in a choral unison,

"The Dream Weaver watches, the Dream Weaver watches!"

To close, I ask: to what extent have you controlled your dreams? How often, and on how large and how deep of a scale have you explored the innumerable possibilities of the lucid realm?

Well, I didn't know what Eidolon Phantoms meant, so I googled it, and got this!

http://www.thesatan.com/phantom/eidolon"Eidolon is the most haunting Phantom Metal album ever devised. With the most unnatural and sinister atmospheres, coupled with truly bizarre rhythms and oddly melodic tunes, Eidolon will traumatize anyone insane enough to listen to this album. Often described as acoustic terrorism, listening to the album ..."

Needless to say, I am NOT listening to that!!!! LOL

But other than that, it sounds pretty cool. There are a good number of Lucid Dreamers online who talk about the conection between psychedelics and lucid dreaming. I don't use substances myself but I think you might find people like that if you just search youtube for "lucid dreaming and psychedelics" or something like that.

I also wanted to compliment your writing skills. That was really well written. Lots of great vocabulary and phrasing. So if you combine that with writing some cool dream experiences, you could definitely be an author.

Here is a link to my dream journal if you want to know what I am up to in the dream world! https://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/charles3/

I'm gonna continue this trend with my own experience on world construction, I'm not as experienced as you seem, I can't shatter a dream and build it a new, I wish I could, I will get to it, I'm only 23, but at age 20 or so, I had my fair share of lucid dreams, a couple now lost dream journals I'd like to read once again, I used to do maps of the worlds i traveled through i any lucid and non lucid dream. Now some backstory on the world construction I'm about to talk about, it's a paradox proposed by a matemathician called the infinite hotel that states that, as IT IS infinite you can fit, say a bus of infinite people in, just by moving everyone one room up, you can fit any amount of infinitys inside another infinite and so on.At this age I dreamt of a hotel I woke up in, and it inmediately reminded me of the infinite hotel, I came down like 10 floors to the hall, filled with my old teachers, and some friends that were passing by, had a orange juice on the bar and came back to the stairs, after going up a couple floors, I stopped at the 4th one where one of the rooms had no door, it's entrance was a pile of mud that reached the celling, I came closer and inspected it not knowing at that moment what it was, and after a couple minutes, simply walked throught it making myself ethereal. At the other side there was a balcony, I looked down and saw the street with people walking by, in front of me there were more buildings more or less the height I was at, but as I looked up I couldn't see an ending to my hotel, on the balcony there was a plain surface, half a meter from the ground, with some dirt on it, and as I got closer I could see burrying spiders on every inch of it, then reflected about who to have room for in the building... Why not every entity on the dreamscape, so they could have somwhere to always retreat to when they wish to. While I was thinking about that i suddenly woke up, noted the dream and kept on with my life.

I've been visiting this place from time to time building it as I think convenient or as the dream characters want it to be, for example, I've come across some dragons on my dreams and if you take the elevator to the correct floor you'll get to theyr floor, where every door leads to a whole world where that dragon rules his own land.There's also room for paranormal entities on it, as they don't seem to need breathing, a confortable room or even space or time, i told them to keep the roof of the infinite hotel, that is inaccesible to anyone as it is imposible to get there, there's no end to infinity and yet, it exists, as of now I think I'm the only one able to get there appart from them by teleporting. They are 2 little kids (the boy's smaller than the girl) on ragged clothes I had some dreams with them that, in this order: Made me feel unconfortable(they killed some dream characters), intrigued me, made me try 2 get close 2 them and finnaly develope affection for them as I got to know them better.There's a Harem room on the 5th floor made of 5 beds where the girls that are part of that room spawn on any bed if they want to.It also goes forever down, I will tell you about my personal HELL on other post, still working on knowing it better.There's just no end to how many rooms fit in and how much fits on any room, and like so I will keep building and discovering(As you told in your story I also enjoy letting the dream take control over anything it feels like doing) rooms forever.

DISCLAIMER: THIS BUILDING IS NOT COPYRIGHTED, IN FACT I ENCOURAGE YOU TO BUILD YOUR OWN TILL YOUR HEARTH'S CONTEMPT.

On the next chapter: My personal workshop planet to build and try out things that orbits a black hole you can jump onto to get anywhere.Also working on: Warhammer 40.000 Planetary scale battles (I will be leading a Tyranid Army)[Just google it and judge the idea for yourself]